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I could do a post on all the tips and things I am learning about Google Plus but, especially since this is a brand new service, they are coming in way too fast. For now you can see my ever expanding list via my shared Evernote Notebook at the link below:

My career in developing large scale systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate started in 1999 with Xanga. I left after a couple years and got more academic about the democratization of information on the web. Ironically, I wrote two books about blogging. In 2002, I tried to start a microblogging service but have you heard of Sideblogger? Didn’t think so.

When I joined the Blogger team at Google in 2003, my new envir… show all text

Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines. – It’s an initiative for knowing the people behind a website. It’s a TXT file that contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website.

The Transportation Security Administration stood by its security officers Sunday after a Florida woman complained that her cancer-stricken, 95-year-old mother was patted down and forced to remove her adult diaper while going through security.

Skype is being criticized for terminating employees immediately prior to the closing of the Microsoft acquisition, and people are assuming they’re doing this to keep the value of those employees stock options. Skype’s response boils down to saying that the employees were fired because they weren’t good employees, and that the value of the stock is negligible and didn’t affect the decision making process.
Ok. But it gets worse.
Employees aren’t even able to keep the vested portion of their stock… show all text

Foursquare has just closed one of the most secretive rounds of venture capital TechCrunch has seen.
The company is raising $50 million, and all of it will go towards building out the company, no secondary sales here. The valuation had been rumored to be as high as $1 billion, but our sources say it settled out at $550 million pre-money, $600 million post.
Part of that is because the round was mostly done by insiders. Leading it was Andreessen Horowitz, still the only major Valley firm invested … show all text

While discussing possible names for a product recently, someone asked me if we were at the point where getting the perfect domain name was less important than it used to be. While I’m still a sucker for a clean .com, it does seem less important, and it will continue to become less important, for at least five reasons: 1) GoogleThere was as time when you knew your friend’s and family member’s phone numbers. There may have been a time when you knew the addresses of people you emailed a lot. And … show all text

LulzSec just now announced a trove of leaked material it claims is from Arizona law enforcement agencies, made available as a 446MB torrent.
We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona. The documents classified as… show all text

TL;DR version: Last year, I was threatened with a lawsuit over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop. Despite my firm belief that I was legally in the right, I settled out of court to cut my losses. This ordeal was very nerve-wracking for me and my family, and I’ve had trouble writing about it publicly until now.
Still want the full story? Read on.
(Note: This post was reviewed by both my and Jay Maisel’s legal counsel.)

The Long Version
Remember Kind of Bloop, the chiptune tribute to M… show all text

Huge news in the gaming world: PopCap Games, the company behind such hits as Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled, is in the process of being acquired — and we’re hearing from multiple sources that the price is over $1 billion.
The question now is who the buyer is. The obvious possibility is Zynga, which has made a string of game-related acquisitions over the last year. But we’re hearing they’re out. Our sources say that Zynga did indeed kick the tires hard on a potential acquisition, but it looks l… show all text

Tomorrow is going to be a tough day for getting around in San Francisco. Taxi drivers are going on strike, and while they circle City Hall in hopes of getting a better deal, Uber is making sure to do our part to keep San Francisco moving.
Uber and its driver partners are planning to stand in solidarity with the people of San Francisco. That means making sure ordinary folks can get around the city while the taxi drivers strike to get a fair deal. So, on Tuesday, June 21st, from 4am until midnigh… show all text

The Bitcoin community faced another crisis on Sunday afternoon as the price of the currency on the most popular exchange, Mt.Gox, fell from $17 to pennies in a matter of minutes. Trading was quickly suspended and visitors to the home page were redirected to a statement blaming the crash on a compromised user account. Mt.Gox’s Mark Karpeles said that the exchange would be taken offline to give administrators time to roll back the suspect transactions.
The extent of the compromise became clear wh… show all text

Microsoft has released the new SkyDrive. Designed with HTML5, it looks pretty cool and works well in modern browsers (IE9, Chrome, Firefox 4). So far I have only tried it in Google Chrome and I was able to create and edit a word document. You can also share files with people and edit collaboratively. Check out the demo video below:

Engadget reports that Google is buying SageTV. This is huge news! If I didn’t have Windows Media Center I’d be looking seriously at SageTV. Sage already has set-top box hardware for extending content from PC to the TV. Google could use that or leverage that into what they are already offering in their Google TV products.I don’t think many of us who follow this space saw this coming. Michael Welter, over on Missing Remote, posted the email that users received.Will I switch? Well, that remains to be seen. Really curious where Google will take this. Also still curious where Microsoft will go with Media Center in Windows 8. No matter what, it is an exciting space to watch!
If you don’t know about Sage, here is a video: